Use these three steps to communicate your change strategy

Before you get all creative with a magical metaphor to communicate your strategy or other major change, think about the three basic steps of ready, aim, fire.

First, prepare the messages you want to get across (ready). Then decide to whom you need to communicate (aim). Only then should you put your methods into practice, and communicate (fire). Fire, ready, aim rarely works, any more than ready… ready… ready…!

Keep talking during a time of change to reinforce the reasons for change and to celebrate progress

Often, during times of change, leaders make the mistake of thinking ‘there is nothing new to say, so I’ll say nothing.’ Well, human beings hate a vacuum so they fill it, often with ill-informed gossip that slows down the change effort, perhaps even derails it.

So, fill the vacuum by continuously reinforcing the reasons for change and celebrate the progress that has been made to date.

How leaders and communicators can win hearts and minds in change management

Asking a group of people to change the way they’ve been doing something for years often triggers highly charged emotional responses, and they are rarely positive. Yet when tackling change management, so many organisations seem to ignore this. Instead they rely heavily on filling out logical but complex change templates and ordering people to do things differently.

Administrative processes and direct instructions have their place in change management, for example when health and safety compliance is needed. However, no amount of form-filling by leaders is going to inspire people to let go of their old ways of working and adopt new ones.

In fact, telling people to change just causes them to take a stand and doggedly cling to the status quo. When Kennedy said: “We’ll put a man on the moon by the end of the decade”, he inspired an entire nation as well as NASA. He didn’t then whip out a Gantt chart to prove his thinking!

Change from within

However inspiring the carefully crafted vision for the future, nothing will actually change if people aren’t convinced that they need to move on from what they’re currently doing.

Sure, they might nod and smile when you talk about the desired change; they’re not politically naive or stupid. But the minute you walk down the corridor, they’ll crack on doing exactly what they’ve always done. As the American author Irene Peter wryly noted: “Just because everything is different, doesn’t mean anything has changed.”

In my experience, what really works is creating an environment where people identify for themselves that the way they are currently doing things is no longer the way forward. Better still, they start persuading each other and, even better still, they start telling their leaders.

So, your job as leader or communication professional is to paint the picture of success, then let people join the dots for themselves. That’s the way to win hearts as well as minds.

Creating ‘change from within’ takes thought and effort, especially compared to ordering people to change ‘because HQ want us to’. But the foundations you’ll create will result in far greater ownership and advocacy of the change. This way, you will build a more solid structure to support sustained change. Find practical examples of how to make this happen, in the early chapters of John Kotter’s The Heart of Change.

Beyond ‘lessons learnt’

Now you’ve got your people fired up and passionate about delivering the change, perhaps even co-creating ways to deliver it. But, the gravitational pull of templates and form-filling at the other end of the project can still tarnish your efforts. Enter the ‘lessons learnt’ or ‘post implementation review”. Unfortunately, once completed, this is often consigned to the darker recesses of a SharePoint site never to be discussed or seen again. And the result? Little actually gets learnt.

While of course complying with the agreed and audited internal process, why not make heroes and heroines of your new-found champions for change in a very public space? Get them sharing their success stories on your intranet, acknowledging the challenges they’ve overcome in your internal publications, showcasing the difference they’ve made at your events and inspiring their fellow workers to new heights in their corridor conversations. All you are doing is bringing your lessons learnt to life.

And why wait until the end of the project? You can add real momentum to your change effort by celebrating success early and often.

For your organisation to execute its strategy, employees need a clear destination and a route map to follow

When facilitating conferences, I sometimes start with an icebreaker called ‘Point North’. I get everyone in the hall to stand up, close their eyes and, without talking, turn round three times on the spot. With their eyes still closed, I get them all to point North. Then I ask them to open their eyes. The inevitable result is a forest of arms pointing in multiple directions.

This little exercise serves to make the very simple point that, without adequate information, in this case, visual or auditory sensory input, it’s easy to get confused about where we’re meant to be going.

It’s something that applies to many large organisations – thousands of people are no doubt working very hard, yet their efforts are often not focused on what’s really important for the organisation’s success. ‘Point North’ sets the stage nicely for the work we often get participants to do during a conference to address this problem by setting and agreeing the organisation’s aspirations and goals, creating a common sense of direction and then creating the plan for getting there.

Indeed, that’s a fair summary of the nature of much of Axiom’s work these days. More often than not, we are working with clients who want to bring about major change in their business, often to implement a new corporate strategy. We help people at all levels in the organisation reach a shared understanding of both the destination and the route. It’s something I have recently come to think of as helping organisations navigate the strategic journey they want to take – in short, strat nav.

Paint the Big Picture

One of our favourite ways to achieve this is through our highly successful Big Picture approach. We depict an organisation’s strategy through a large-scale image that provides a visual analogy and supporting narrative for the journey being undertaken. The image shows where the organisation has come from, its current position, where it’s heading and how it’s going to get there. Crucially, it helps employees see where they fit in and how they can contribute to the journey.

In the past, we’ve illustrated company change programmes as missions into space, mountain-climbing expeditions, ambitious construction projects and major sporting events. But there’s always a common theme: a journey from the old ways of working to the new.

The Big Picture is so powerful because images can engage in a way that the written or spoken word may not. Professor Paul Martin Lester of California State University says people remember only 10% of what they hear and 20% of what they read, but 80% of what they see and do. And in this digital age, our reliance on visual stimuli is growing. “We are becoming a visually mediated society,” says Prof Lester. “For many, understanding of the world is being accomplished not through words, but by reading images.” What’s more, images are far more immediate and memorable than documents and presentations. They also work internationally across language barriers.

Stories grab attention, are more memorable and convincing than simple information, and are much more likely to lead to action. They provide a narrative everyone can buy into and get passionate about and are easily retold.

Charting a course for success

We’ve combined storytelling with visual images in our Big Picture approach for dozens of clients. For Swedish surgical equipment maker Mölnlycke, we developed a campaign that envisaged its strategy as a sailing voyage. The visual analogy we co-created made a compelling case for change and provided a clear view of what success would look like and the challenges that lay ahead year by year.

Mattias Hakeröd, global HR director at Mölnlycke, told us afterwards: “Our people really liked this approach to explaining our strategy. It helped us overcome language and cultural barriers, and now everyone is talking about the strategy at all levels – including those who wouldn’t usually engage.”

Set the direction, provide the route, take people with you on the journey

Of course, the Big Picture is just one possible approach. We’ve just recently finished helping the UK arm of a major global merchant with a simple, pragmatic communication campaign executed against a very demanding timeline to help their people embark on a major two-year change journey. The organisation was announcing a radical new strategy that involved significant investment, merging and closure of branches and a rebrand. For some colleagues, change would be exciting and promising; for others, it would mean disruption and the threat of redundancy.

We worked with the top team to put together a management event, a series of briefings across the company and a range of engaging communication materials to persuade people of the importance of the changes and allay their concerns. At the outset, it was essential that we openly and truthfully gave colleagues the context – the market dynamics that made the changes essential, the long-term aims, the major milestones along the way – as well as helping them work out what it all meant for them at a local, individual, day-to-day level. The feedback we’ve had so far has been very encouraging – employees seem to be buying into the change plan and the approach to communicating it.

Whatever the method, getting everyone to be clear on the destination, engage in the journey and understand the detailed route map – that’s the task for communicators today. So maybe it’s time for you to work out how you’re going to provide a strat nav for your organisation?

How to bring your vision or strategy to life with Big Picture communication, so your people get it, remember it, believe in it – and know what they need to do make it happen

“Look, we’ve got a crystal-clear vision for this business,” a CEO of a global business once told me, having spent, it seemed to me, the GDP of a small country with a consulting firm to get to it.

I sat at his shiny boardroom table, sharpening my employee-engagement pencil to make notes. “We need to grow market share by X% against a background of declining volumes, we need upper-quartile EBIT, we need to improve ROI by Y% and we need to cut headcount and waste by Z%. But when I talk to people about all this, no-one seems to get it – they just stare at me blankly. What do they want me to do? Draw them a [expletive deleted!] diagram?”

“Well, probably, yes…I think that would help enormously,” I replied. And so began a project to bring his vision (the clue is in the word) to life globally so that everyone in the business, at all levels and all around the world, could see what he meant, could remember it, believe in it and, most importantly, knew what they needed to do to make it a reality.[Read more…]

Want to use the immediacy and impact of podcasting to enhance engagement in your organisation?

Start with these guidelines from Axiom associate and seasoned audio producer Mik Wilkojc

“What exactly is a podcast?” That’s a question I’m often asked as someone with a background in national radio and a producer of corporate audio programmes. The simple answer is it’s a term combining the ‘pod’ of ‘iPod’ with the ‘cast’ of ‘broadcast’. It refers to an audio file you download from a website or intranet onto your computer, tablet or smartphone – and then listen to when and where you like.

But, as with any potent means of communication, there’s a lot more to it than that.

Consider content and copyright

I define the ‘pod’ element as Personally Overseen Data. As a podcaster, you are a publisher, and hence responsible for the content and copyright of the material you disseminate. This means that, in the real world, you don’t have carte blanche.

Let’s look at content first. As with any published format, you are covered by the law of libel. In a nutshell, don’t podcast anything false or malicious that might damage a person or organisation’s reputation. This isn’t to say you can’t be controversial, challenging or cheeky; just be sure you can back up what you say.

Even so, you can, at reasonable cost, use ‘production music’ to ‘dress’ your podcasts. You can buy for this for limited distribution in your podcast. Alternately, you could ask around and see if there’s a budding musician who might knock-up – cheap or for free – some beds (music or sound effect played in the background) and idents (a jingle or other sound effect that identifies your programme).

You might be thinking: “But I’m only broadcasting to a bunch of colleagues across a couple of sites.” That may be the case, but with the proliferation of social media, you’d be amazed how quickly, and inadvertently, something can go global. You might at first be pleased by that, but there are plenty of exposed backsides out there in the ether that were intended for an audience of one. Just saying.

Harness the power of the human voice

As important as content and copyright is the mood, the timbre, the vibe you want to engender. You want to be informative without being tedious. Authoritative, without being authoritarian.

In the corporate sphere, it helps to find someone to front a podcast who speaks the language of management, but has the common touch with the audience. They have to adapt a third way of manipulating their speech – the one that sits between normal conversation and making a presentation. Ideally, they have to be a natural storyteller. Someone who can subtly modulate what they say, creating light and shade to what could otherwise be rather uniform grey. Keep an ear open at the water-cooler and in the canteen line and you might well tune into that certain someone among your colleagues as they tell anecdotes and gags.

Podcasting is a very intimate medium. It’s downloaded to a personal device and then – usually – fed directly into the recipient’s ears. Get the feel right, and you can build an enthusiastic audience of thousands, one-by-one.

Which brings us neatly to knowing and getting your audience. Unlike most podcasts, there will be an element of obligation in consumption. A comms podcast isn’t a leisure activity. It’s there to get across news and concepts. The added dimension of the sheer, well, humanity of the human voice will clarify and reinforce your messages more than you can imagine.

The voice. It’s the ultimate font.

Podcasts: The adaptable medium

Today, you can use podcasts in all kinds of ways inside your organisation. For instance, you can use a one-off podcast to help announce a major change. That can give employees a chance to hear directly from senior leaders about what’s coming.

Or you might launch a regular magazine-style podcast that people subscribe to so it gets downloaded automatically to their computer, tablet or mobile as soon as it’s available. These regular shows can keep employees updated on all kinds of news and issues. It can work like a really good radio show – with a presenter and a range of guests. There’s scope for including the ideas and opinions of frontline staff from all levels. You can also set up hard-hitting interviews with senior leaders.

Top team at major insurer create their own development programme to build engagement capability

Leaders from Assicurazioni Generali SpA United Kingdom Branch (Generali UKB) are better able to influence their teams after learning to identify and respond to others’ habitual ways of behaving and communicating.

The 40 senior managers at the insurance firm honed their engagement skills in a workshop run by Axiom’s Miles Henson. The Knowing Me, Knowing You training is based on DISC, the behavioural and communication assessment tool that provides an insight into people’s personality traits and how they behave at work.

Before the event, participants completed a DISC self-assessment questionnaire and received a personalised evaluation of their natural communication style. On the day, they explored ways to adapt their style to meet the needs of others with different DISC profiles.

The workshop was just one element in an on-going package of support for Generali UKB that seeks to drive up employee engagement by first building leadership capability. In a kick-off workshop, we helped the organisation’s managers set their goals for business performance and employee engagement and then create their own bespoke engagement skills development programme that we would deliver. Knowing Me, Knowing You topped the wish-list.

In subsequent workshops, we helped leaders discover how to use storytelling techniques to engage employees and provided the leadership group with intensive training on the theory and practice of communicating change.

Rocco Romanelli, Head of Generali UKB, says: “Axiom has helped the company in understanding the meaning of employee engagement and therefore we are now much better equipped to motivate our people to execute the business strategy and deliver on our priorities.

“Axiom has challenged us to go further than I thought possible in a very short space of time.”

You’re happy, the board is happy, the world is happy. Time to let your hair down and celebrate, then? Sorry to be a party pooper but, nope…

…In truth, you can’t be sure you’ve really achieved anything yet. All you know is that some information left ‘A’. And that’s it! You don’t know what, if anything, arrived at ‘B’, let alone if those at ‘B’ understood it, what they made it mean and, critically, if they’re going to do anything about it.

Up ‘til now, all this effort in communicating your strategy has, perhaps, made not one iota of difference to the engagement of your people, the execution of the strategy and the performance of the organisation. It may have been the corporate comms equivalent of vanity publishing.

So how can you tell if your messages are really getting through to your people? Well, here’s something radical: Try asking them!

After all, as Winston Churchill once said: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”

Give communication measurement the attention and budget it deserves

You know what you were trying to achieve through your strategy communication – that’s what’s in your manifesto. It’s a baby step more to reach out to your audience and ask them some incisive questions to determine if they ‘get it’ and know what they are supposed to be doing differently to execute your strategy.

Measurement of the understanding and adoption of your key messages simply must be built into your strategy communication programme. It’s not a bolt-on.

I recommend that you allocate 70% of your budget to getting your messages out there and 20% to measurement (leaving 10% in your back pocket in case some messages aren’t universally understood and you need to ‘course correct’ through additional comms).

More often than not, the measurement step is not taken. I think some people might be scared of the results. What happens if I ask them and they don’t ‘get it’ – they don’t understand the company strategy or what they’re supposed to be doing to contribute? Well, then a whole bunch of your people are drawing a salary without truly understanding how to target their time and effort to best effect – and that sounds more expensive than any measurement exercise.

So, resist the temptation to allocate your measurement budget to an even higher-profile ‘guest speaker’ at your kick-off event. Instead, use it to find out if you’re actually making an impact.

And you don’t have to spend the earth to find out. You can plug in to existing measurement activities for free, such as company-wide employee opinion surveys (although by their nature these surveys are very wide ranging). Or you could commission a specific, more focused piece of work using internal resources or an external provider.

I once asked a team of receptionists to make outbound calls during quiet periods on the front desk to survey a sample of employees. They loved the additional variety in their working day. I loved their telephone manner and the insights they gathered for me.

Equally, there is much to be said for harnessing the expertise and independence of a third- party research house.

And you’re not short of survey methodologies these days. Online, paper-based, telephone, face-to-face focus groups; quantitative or qualitative.

Ask the right questions

Whichever route you take, it pays to ask the right questions. Questions that are consistently understood by everyone who responds to them and produce reliable data. Meaningful questions that go to the core of what you’re trying to achieve as an organisation. Questions that elicit feedback you can actually act on. What you are looking for is evidence of whether people are executing your strategy through concrete actions.

And consider who you survey and when. At conferences, we’ve all used ‘happy sheets’, hurriedly completed as the bar beckons and participants are on a high anyway. Many times, the only concrete feedback you get from these is that the room was too cold and the sandwiches too hot! So make sure you do something meaningful with these quick questionnaires – as a minimum, ask people what key messages they are taking away and what they intend to do differently.

More radically, tell managers that you are going to measure the quality of their cascade communication, three months after the conference or other strategy launch activity, by surveying their direct reports to find out what’s been communicated, understood and acted on. And tell them that you’re going to publish the findings. Conference-goers sit up straight and lick the end of their pencils at the very thought of the idea!

Then of course make sure you do publish your results, by function or location. And track the results over time, as your strategy communication campaign gathers pace, using ‘pulse-check’ style research to inform a quarterly engagement index, a bit like the FTSE 100 index or the NASDAQ.

Most importantly, act on the results, either to target the next wave of your communication campaign, and the next, and the next. Or to call attention to examples of people making the changes that the organisation requires. Measurement doesn’t just have to point out gaps and shortfalls – it can also be a way to help you celebrate success.

The bottom line in measuring internal communication

And if you follow the steps I’ve shared through this series of five blogs on communicating strategy, the odds are that you will be celebrating success.

But let me end on a note of realism. In the world of internal communication, success has many fathers; there’s always another team or individual ready to step in and take the credit for a job well done. Failure, on the hand, is a bastard child.

Either way, if you measure properly, you’ll know for sure if you are really getting through to your people. So ask them. I dare you.

The wonder of Woolies – a lesson from the past

More years ago than I care to mention, and many years before their eventual demise, I was working with the leading value retailer in the UK, good old Woolies – or Woolworth’s to use the name above the door. Our role? To support the new leader in communicating a new strategy to the workforce.

One of the first steps we took was to call a meeting of the ‘top 12’ execs. We asked them to scribble down on Post-Its the five things they believed their business was about, one per Post-It. We then put each Post-It on a wall. Even when we took away the duplicates and near-duplicates, we had 45 top-five things the business was about!

If the top team wasn’t clear, what chance did tens of thousands of employees have, never mind millions of customers? That was the wonder of Woolies!

Woolworth’s no longer exists on the High Street.

So why bother explaining your strategy to your employees? Well, as one straight-talking guru once explained: “You try delivering it without them!”

How to structure and bring your stories to life

With millions flocking to cinemas around the world to see Oscar-winning movies, it struck me we have something to learn from Hollywood’s stunning ability to tell stories and engage audiences.

In an earlier blog, I spoke about the power of storytelling in business as a tool to help communicate strategy. Now, I turn to how to structure and bring your stories to life – with a little help from Tinsel Town and indeed from science.